Online payments company Stripe expands to 130 currencies

Stripe, the online payments firm started by two Irish brothers in their mid-20s and valued at $1.75bn (£1.06bn) last month, has expanded its payment services from four to over 130 currencies.

“This is something that is phenomenally important to businesses, because when you’re selling to an increasingly global audience you want to be able to make transactions as frictionless as possible for anyone, anywhere,” Stripe co-founder and president John Collison, 23, told City AM last week.

Stripe users in the US, the UK and Europe can now receive payment in almost any currency in the world and have funds automatically exchanged into their preferred currency.

“We work with banking partners in different regions for the back end services, but the real crux of it from a product point of view is making it simple and intuitive enough that we felt comfortable launching it,” added Collison, who founded Stripe with his brother Patrick.

“It’s our belief that by improving the infrastructure available to people, by handling the cost and complexity… if we make it so simple to move money around, just think about what can be built.”

Stripe powers the e-commerce services of some of the largest online businesses including Squarespace, Hipmunk, Rackspace and Reddit.

“We are pleased to be working with Stripe to offer our readers more responsive and dynamic ways of accessing some of our popular subscription services in the UK,” said Julia Porter consumer revenues director of Guardian News & Media. The Guardian uses Stripe to power its existing UK subscriptions and is exploring the potential of the service to support audience revenue streams worldwide.

Last month Stripe was valued at $1.75bn as part of a funding round that raised $80m, bringing the total raised by the company to $130m.